Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Search This Blog

Pages

Social Capital, Civic Engagement and The Internet.

“[T]he United States also has undergone a less sanguine transformation:
its citizens have become remarkably less civic, less politically engaged, less
socially connected, less trusting, and less committed to the common good. At the dawn of the millennium Americans are
fast becoming a loose aggregation of disengaged observers, rather than a
community of connected participants.”

Putnam’s thesis is that American
society has undergone a decline in social capital and civic engagement, caused
by a declining rate of generational replacement, technological innovations, spatial
reorganization of cities and the growth of suburban developments. Social capital refers to the networks and
social resources people draw upon in their quotidian lives for support, and it
has been positively correlated with better health, wealth and political
outcomes for individuals and communities.
Despite recognised benefits, Putman argues, since the 1960s social
capital has declined approximately thirty precent. To support this claim data from establish
social organizations and nationally representative surveys conducted by two
separate marketing research companies showed a clear decline in civic engagement and membership of social
clubs. Putnam employed the metaphor of
‘blowing alone’ to encapsulate this trend, Americans’ are still blowing but
group participation has sharply declined. However, Putnam noted that contemporary trends are comparable to
problems encountered in 19th century America; Industrialization and
urbanization swept away the old certainties of agricultural communities for
large sections of the American population and social capital predicated on
pastoral existence was undermined before social networks appropriate to
industrial and urban communities developed.
Social capital might not be in terminal decline, but merely undergoing a
period of abeyance.

Question: To what extent do computer mediated
communication replace earlier modes of social interaction? Is this a possible
medium for post-industrial forms of civic engagement?

Popular posts from this blog

During a lecture before the Eugenics Society in 1937, British economist John Maynard Keynes stated that “a greater cumulative increment than 1 per cent per annum in the standard of life has seldom proved practicable”. Moreover, Keynes continued, “generally speaking the rate of improvement seems to have been somewhat less then 1 per cent per annum cumulative”. Of course, Keynes was speaking during the great depression, and therefore his remarks may be tainted with a particular pessimism. But they draw into sharp relief the experience of economic growth in post-war Japan: between 1950 and 1973, GDP growth averaged 10%, a rate of sustained growth never before seen .By 1962, the English publication Economist, with poetic flair, dubbed Japan’s recovery an “economic miracle” . This designation caught on and became a general catch phrase for spectacular economic growth. In the case of Japan, a multitude of explanations have arisen for why Japan underwent an ‘economic miracle’. Crucial to el…

Western Marxism has often laid considerable stress upon the ideology of modern capitalist societies. This focus upon ideology stems from the failure of proletarian revolution to have either occurred, or establish socialism within Western Europe. The exact nature and function of ideology became paramount in Marxian explanations of the continued stability of Western capitalism after the Great War and Great Depression. Marxian conceptualizations of symbolic domination (under the notion of ideology) remain in the realm of consciousness and intellectual frameworks. Pierre Bourdieu developed a paradigm for understanding symbolic power and domination through his theory of dispositional practices that breaks with the concept of ideology and it basis in the tradition of ‘Kantian intellectualism’. This theoretical model both deepens and broadens the sociological understanding of symbolic power and domination, through the acknowledgment of non-intellectual and bodily elements in the dynamics of…